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With Adobe Photoshop Sketch you can draw freely on your iPad, and you can easily share your sketches to Photoshop CC or via email. The iPad is so portable, and Adobe Photoshop Sketch so powerful, that together they make sketching “en plein aire” feel very easy and natural, even though you’re working on a tablet rather than with paper and ink. En plein aire is a French term that means “in the open air.” If you want to sketch outdoors with your iPad, consider setting up an umbrella, or sitting in the shade of a tree, as I did for this article. Shading your screen reduces glare, and it allows you to enjoy choosing colors and sketching outdoors naturally.

Adobe Photoshop Sketch features a versatile array of sketching tools. In this project we’ll focus on making a colored mixed-media study with the latest update, Adobe Photoshop Sketch 2.1. For this example, I drew Single Tree, shown in Figure 1, en plein aire, sketching outside under the shade of a tree.

With Adobe Photoshop Sketch 2.1, you can sketch using your fingers or a passive stylus (such as the Wacom Bamboo Solo), as well as the pressure-sensitive Adobe Ink stylus or the Wacom Intuos Creative Stylus. For details on how to connect the Adobe Ink stylus with Adobe Photoshop Sketch, see my article “More Sketching on the Go: Freehand Sketching with Adobe Photoshop Sketch and Adobe Ink.”

Setting Up and Getting Started

When you launch Adobe Photoshop Sketch, a series of project panels appear. Tap on a project panel to open a canvas. With a canvas mounted, the Toolbar and menu appear along the top of the screen, along with the mark-making and coloring tools such as pencils and markers.

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For a more detailed explanation of the Toolbar and icons, see “Sketching on the Go: Fluid Freehand Sketching with Adobe Illustrator Draw.”